We introduce a ray tracing scheme, which is able to handle highly complex geometry modeled by the classic approach of surface patches tessellated to micro-polygons, where the number of micro-polygons can exceed the available memory. Two techniques allow us to carry out global illumination computations in such scenes and to trace the resulting incoherent sets of rays efficiently. For one, we rely on a bottom-up technique for building the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) over tessellated patches in time linear in the number of micro-polygons. Second, we present a highly parallel two-stage ray tracing algorithm, which minimizes the number of tessellation steps by reordering rays. The technique can accelerate rendering scenes that would result in billions of micro-polygons and efficiently handles complex shading operations.

Two-Level Ray Tracing with Reordering for Highly Complex Scenes,
Johannes Hanika, Alexander Keller, and Hendrik Lensch,
Proceedings of Graphics Interface, pages 145--152, 2010.

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